Professor Gross does not sensationalize the actual murder itself. A day-long orgy of violence, which was at once primitive and comprehensive, featured the climax of burning alive those Jews who had not perished in the mayhem of the day. In fact, not only did the non-Jewish Poles of Jedwabne participate; participants from other nearby Polish communities, themselves veterans of other pogroms, journeyed to Jedwabne to commit depredations on the Jewish population. Instead, Gross focuses on the impact this research may have on Polish national identity. In this sense, Gross simultaneously adds to and departs from standard interpretations of the Holocaust.
His research is the least creative in his reaffirmation of the now widely-accepted thesis that those involved in the destruction of European Jewry did so volitionally. Jedwabne's murderers are "willing executioners" in the purest sense of the word. "Everybody who was in town on this day and in possession of a sense of sight, smell or hearing either participated in or witnessed the tormented deaths of the Jews of Jedwabne." Yet "Neighbors" will not leave its mark on Holocaust historiography as a mere reaffirmation of the Browning/Goldhagen thesis of uncoerced genocide. Professor Gross' monography deserves praise for the questions it poses and the new directions it stakes out.
More important is Gross' investigation of how thoroughly Jew hatred has saturated Polish society and how that vicious prejudice found outlet through the Nazi policy of annihilation. His research disabuses theorists who propound a "modernist" interpretation of the Holocaust. His analysis of the Jedwabne massacre asks for a "heterogeneous" interpretation of the event; one which acknoledges that many participants acted with the most primitive of instruments, without bureaucracy to direct their efforts and from a myriad of purposes and motivations. He challenges future historians to accept and cherish the accounts of survivors instead of treating them with skepticism. "The greater the catastrophe the fewer the survivors. We must be capable of listening to lonely voices reaching us from the abyss."
Finally, Professor Gross may make his greatest contribution to the future of a genuinely free Poland with his invocation to an inclusive history of Poland's involvement in the destruction of its own population, its own Jews, during World War II. Eschewing collective responsibility, Professor Gross nonetheless warns Poles of the danger of ignoring this extraordinary event in its past. To ignore involvement in mass murder vitiates future claims to moral coherence. It is this call to conscience that makes the terse "Neighbors" a critical additition to Holocaust historiography.